by David Drake
Dresser laced his fingers again. "Then the Ichtons sent out another convoy . . ."
* * *
Dresser looked from Kaehler to Bailey. Both scientists were glassy-eyed with fatigue.
"Ah, Captain Bailey?" Dresser said.
Bailey didn't reply. He may not even have heard.
The display was a fierce blue glare which sparkled but never significantly changed. It was like watching the play of light across the facets of a diamond, mesmerizing but empty.
"Cap—"
Thousand-meter fireballs rippled suddenly at the north side of the mothership's shields. Through them, as inexorable as a spear cleaving a rib cage, rocked a column of Ichton vehicles.
The leading tank spewed a stream of flux projectiles that gnawed deep into the Mantran defenses until a white-hot concentration of power focused down on the vehicle. The tank ripped apart in an explosion greater than any of those which destroyed it, widening the gap in the Mantran defensive wall.
The convoy's second vehicle was also a tank. It continued the work of destruction as it shuddered onward. The defenders' fire quivered on the Ichton shield, but the Mantrans couldn't repeat the concentration that had overwhelmed the leader.
"They can't stop it." Dresser whispered. "It's over."
The image volume went red/orange/white. The dense jewel of the mothership blazed through a fog that warped and almost hid its outlines. The blur of seasons was lost in the greater distortion.
"Kaehler, what have you done, you idiot?" Bailey shouted. He stepped out of his module; hands clenched, face distorted in the light of the hologram. Except for the blue core, the image could almost be that of the display's stand-by mode—points of light in a random pattern, visual white noise.
Except for the Ichton mothership at the blue heart of it.
"It wasn't . . ." Kaehler said as her hands played across her controls with a brain surgeon's delicacy, freezing the image and then reversing it in minute increments.
" . . . me!" The last word was a shout, the first time Dresser had heard Kaehler raise her voice.
The image froze again in time. A disk of the planet's surface, hundreds of kilometers in diameter, slumped and went molten. Its center was the Ichton vessel. Vaporized rock, atmospheric gases fused into long chains, and plasma bursting upward from subterranean thermonuclear blasts turned the whole viewing area into a hellbroth in which the states of matter were inextricably blended.
The scout understood what had happened before either of the scientists did. "They blew it down to the mantle," Dresser said. "The Mantrans did. Their weapons couldn't destroy the Ichtons, so they used the planet to do it."
And failed, but he didn't say that aloud.
Kaehler let the image scroll forward again, though at a slower rate of advance than that at which she had proceeded before. The Ichton convoy vanished, sucked into liquescent rock surging from the planet's core. Plates of magma cooled, cracked, and upended to sink again into the bubbling inferno.
Sulphur compounds from the molten rock spewed into the stratosphere and formed a reflective haze. The sky darkened to night, not only at the target site but over the entire planet. Years and decades went by as the crater slowly cooled. Night continued to cloak the chaos.
"Bring it back to the point of the explosion, Kaehler," the captain said. Bailey spoke in what was a restrained tone, for him. For the first time during the operation he used the intercom instead of shouting his directions from the support module. "Freeze it at the instant the shockwave hit them. That must have been what destroyed the ship."
"It didn't destroy the ship," Kaehler said. Her voice had even less affect than usual. The image continued to advance.
The magnetic shields of the Ichton vessel provided the only certain light. The ship floated on a sea of magma, spherical and unchanged.
"They're dead inside it!" Bailey shouted. "Focus on the microsecond of the first shockwave!"
"You damned fool!" Kaehler shouted back. "I don't have that degree of control. We've got a hundred-millimeter aperture, or have you forgotten?"
Dresser watched Kaehler's profile as she spoke. She didn't look angry. Her face could have been a death mask.
The display continued to crawl forward. Lava crusted to stone. Cracks between solid blocks opened less frequently to cast their orange light across the wasteland. Century-long storms washed the atmosphere cleaner if not clean.
Bailey blinked and sat down in his module. Kaehler turned back to her controls.
"Their own people," she said in a voice that might not have been intended even for Dresser. "There were thousands of them in the defenses. They all died."
There had been millions of Mantrans in the defense lines.
"They couldn't pull them out," the scout said softly. "The defenses had to hold until the last instant, so that the mantle rupture would get all the Ichtons."
"Did they know they were going to die?" Kaehler whispered.
"They knew they'd all die anyway," Dresser said.
Everything in the universe would die.
The mothership released a sheaf of missiles, bright streaks across the roiling sky. Their anti-matter warheads exploded in the far distance, flickers of false dawn.
Three convoys set out from the mothership simultaneously. Mantran forces engaged one convoy while it was still within the display area, but the vain attempt lighted the hummocks of lava as briefly as a lightning flash . . .
* * *
"I knew it was over then," Dresser said to his hands in the admiral's office. "I'd known it before. They don't quit. The Ichtons don't quit."
He looked at the captive again. It now lay on its back. Its six limbs moved slowly, as though they were separate creatures drifting in the currents of the sea.
"It may have been the failure of conventional techniques that forced the Mantrans to develop their superweapon," Horwarth suggested. She wasn't so much arguing with the scout as soothing him.
Dresser shook his head. "There was never a superweapon on mantra, Admiral," he said. "Just death."
* * *
"Move us forward faster, Kaehler," Captain Bailey ordered over the intercom. "And—change the spatial viewpoint, I think. Follow a moving column."
For once, Dresser thought the captain had a point. There was nothing useful to be seen in the neighborhood of the mothership.
Three more convoys set out across the cooling lava. These met no resistance.
Kaehler remained fixed, as though she were a wax dummy at her console.
There was nothing useful to be seen anywhere on the planet.
"Kaehler?"
The female scientist began to change settings with the cool precision of a machine which had just been switched on again. She did not speak.
The images on the display flip-flopped through abrupt changes in time and place. An image of all mantra hung above the console. Half the planet was in sunlight. Yellow-lit cities of the indigenes and the blue speckles of Ichton colonies studded the remaining hemisphere.
For the moment, the colonies were small and there were only a few of them visible. For the moment.
Kaehler's fingers searched discrete blocks of time and space like an expert shuffling cards, throwing up images for a second or less before shifting to the next:
A barren landscape with neither Ichtons nor Mantrans present.
A distant nighttime battle, plasma weapons slamming out bolts of sulphurous yellow that made Ichton shields pulse at the edge of the ultra-violet. Just as Kaehler switched away, an anti-matter warhead obliterated the whole scene. Ichton machinery with maws a kilometer wide, harvesting not only a field of broad-leafed vegetation but the soil a meter down. Enclosed conveyors snaked out of the image area, carrying the organic material toward an Ichton colony. The invaders' tanks oversaw the process, but their waiting guns found no targets.
A Mantran city looming on the horizon—
"There!" Bailey called. "There, hold on that one!"
Kaehler gave
no sign that she heard her superior, but she locked the controls back to a slow crawl again. Perhaps she'd intended to do that in any case.
Mantran resistance had devolved to the local level. This city was ringed with fortifications similar to those which the planet as a whole had thrown up around the Ichton mothership. Though the defenses were kilometers deep, they were only a shadow of those which the invaders had breached around their landing zone.
The Ichton force approaching the city was a dedicated combat unit, not a colonizing endeavor. Turreted tanks guarded the flanks and rear of the invaders' column, but the leading vehicles were featureless tubes several hundred meters long. They looked like battering rams, and their purpose was similar.
The city's defenders met the column with plasma bolts and volleys of missiles. A tank, caught by several bolts and a thermonuclear warhead simultaneously, exploded. The failure of its magnetic shields was cataclysmic, rocking nearby vehicles as the Mantran bombardment had not been able to do.
For the most part, Ichton counterfire detonated the missiles before they struck. Plasma bolts could at best stall an Ichton target for a few moments while the vehicle directed the whole output of its power supply to the protective shields.
The tubular Ichton vehicles were built around flux generators as large as those of the mothership's main armament. Three of them fired together. A section of the Mantran defenses vanished in a sunbright dazzle. It shimmered with all the hues of a fire opal.
The gun vehicles crawled closer to the city. The height of the flux gradient of their projectiles was proportional to the cube of the distance from the launcher's muzzle. Even at a range of several hundred meters, the weapons sheared the intra-atomic bonds of the collapsed metal armoring the defenses.
All the available Mantran weaponry concentrated on the gun vehicles. The ground before their treads bubbled and seethed, and the nearest of the indigenes' fortifications began to slump from the fury of the defensive fire.
The Ichtons fired again; shifted their concentrated aim and fired again; shifted and fired. The gap before them was wide enough to pass the attacking column abreast. Counterfire ceased, save for a vain handful of missiles from launchers which hadn't quite emptied their magazines.
The column advanced. An inner line of plasma weapons opened up—uselessly.
In the ruins of the outer defenses, a few Mantrans thrashed. Muscles, broiled within their shells by heat released when nearby matter ionized, made the Mantrans' segemented bodies coil and knot.
Sergeant Dresser turned his head. He was a scout. He was trained to observe and report information.
There was nothing new to observe here.
"Kaehler!" Captain Bailey shouted from the edge of Dresser's conscious awareness. "Bring us forward by longer steps, woman! This isn't any good to us."
When Dresser faced away from the holographic display, he could see stars in the sky of mantra. He wondered if any of them had planets which had escaped being stripped by the Ichton ravagers . . .
* * *
"Bailey figured," Dresser said in a voice too flat to hold emotion, "that we'd be able to tell when the superweapon was developed by its effect on the Ichtons. When we saw signs of the Ichtons retreating, of their colonies vanishing, then we'd know something had happened and work back to learn what."
Admiral Horwarth nodded. "That sounds reasonable," she said.
"They should've taken a break, Bailey and Kaehler," the scout added in a nonsequitur. His mind, trapped in the past, bounced from one regret to another. "Going straight on, I knew it was a mistake, but I wasn't in charge."
Horwarth looked over her shoulder at the captive Ichton. The movement was a way of gaining time for her to decide how to respond. The Ichton still lay full length on the floor of its cell. Its limbs wrapped its torso tightly.
Horwarth turned again. "Should we have sent more than one team?" she asked. "Was that the problem?"
"No," Dresser said sharply. The harshness of his own voice surprised him.
"No sir," he said, meeting the admiral's eyes in apology. "I don't think so. Time wasn't that crucial. Bailey got focused on finding the superweapon. The more clear it was that no such weapon existed—"
Dresser's anger blazed out unexpectedly. "The planet was a wasteland!" he snarled. "We knew that from the pre-landing survey!"
"The Mantrans could have developed their weapon when it was too late to save their planet, you know," Horwarth suggested mildly. "What we have is evidence that the Ichtons were traumatized by the contact—not that the Mantrans survived it."
Dresser sighed. "Yeah," he said to his hands, "I told myself that. But Bailey—and I think maybe Kaehler too, though it didn't hit her the same way. They weren't focused on the long-term result any more."
He shook his head at the memory. "They were too tired, and it was getting close to dawn . . ."
* * *
Captain Bailey walked toward them from the support module. For a moment, Dresser saw his head silhouetted against the telltale on top of the fusion bottle. The red glow licked around the captain's features like hellfire.
Bailey didn't speak. Kaehler had ignored the last several of his commands anyway.
On the display, two Mantrans huddled together on a plateau as invaders approached from all sides. There were probably fewer than a thousand indigenes surviving at this time horizon.
Kaehler waited like a statue. Her fingers poised above the controls. The apparatus scrolled forward at one second/second.
"How long has it been since the Ichtons landed?" Dresser asked quietly. He wasn't sure she would answer him either.
"Six hundred standard years," Kaehler replied without moving more than her lips. "At the time we're observing, the Mantran year was at two-eighty-one standard. The Ichtons took so much mass with them that the planet shifted to an orbit longer by forty days."
The atmosphere on the holographic display was so foul that the sun shone wanly even at noon. Nevertheless the image area was lighted vividly by the six Ichton colonies visible from this point. Each colony had grown as large as the mothership was when it landed.
When the time was right—when everything useful on mantra had been processed into Ichton equipment or Ichton flesh—the myriad colonies would blast off from the stripped planet. Each would be the mothership of a fresh brood, capable of destroying a further world in logarithmic progression.
"What sort of equipment do the defenders have?" Captain Bailey asked. He was looking at Kaehler.
"They don't have anything, sir," Dresser replied. He knew—all three of them knew—that Kaehler wasn't going to speak. "I thought they were dead, but a few minutes again, they moved a little."
Military operations on mantra had ceased generations before. The Ichton columns grinding away the rock on which the pair of indigenes sheltered were miners, not troops.
"Pan back a little ways, Kaehler," Bailey said. "I want to get a view of the enemy."
Kaehler didn't respond.
The Mantrans were life-sized images above the purring console. One of them coiled more tightly. Bright yellow blotches of fungus were the only color on either body. Illumination from the Ichton colonies turned the hue to sickly green.
Bailey cursed under his breath. He stamped back toward the support module.
When her superior was halfway to his proper position, Kaehler adjusted her controls. The apparent viewpoint lifted, giving Dresser a view of the approaching Ichtons.
The plateau on which the pair of Mantrans lay was artificial. Mining equipment ground away the rock from six directions, lowering the surface of the plain—of the planet—by twenty meters. A snake of tubing connected each of the grinding machines to one of the Ichton colonies which squatted on the horizon. There the material would be sorted, processed, and built into the mothership growing at the heart of each colony.
The closed conveyors gleamed with magnetic shields. Such protection was now unnecessary. Not even rain fell. Separate conveyor lines carried tailings,
the waste that not even Ichton efficiency could use, into the ocean basins already drained by the invaders' requirements.
Cutting heads snuffled up and down the face rock, then moved in a shallow arc to either side with the close of each stroke. An Ichton in shimmering body armor rode each machine, but there was no obvious need for such oversight. The cutters moved like hounds casting, missing nothing in a slow inexorability that was far more chilling than a cat's lithe pounce.
Bits of the upper edge of the plateau dribbled into the maw of a cutter rising to the top of its stroke. One of the Mantrans coiled because the ground was shifting beneath its segmented body. Dresser wasn't sure that the movement was conscious. Certainly the indigene made no concerted effort to escape.
Not that escape was possible.
Kaehler touched her controls, focusing down on the two Mantrans. The images swelled to larger than life size. Edges lost definition.
One of the creatures was chewing on a piece of cloth. Its chitinous jaws opened and closed with a sideways motion. The fabric, a tough synthetic, remained unaffected by the attempt to devour it.
"The left one has a weapon!" Captain Bailey suddenly cried. "Increase the resolution, Kaehler! This must be it!"
Dresser could see that the Mantran, writhing as the plateau disintegrated beneath it, didn't have a weapon. The yellow fungus had eaten away much of the creature's underside. Most of its walking legs were withered, and one had fallen off at the root. That, hard-shelled and kinked at an angle, was what Bailey's desperation had mistaken for a weapon.
Kaehler turned toward her superior. "I can't increase the resolution with a hundred-millimeter aperture," she said in a voice as empty as the breeze.
Bailey stood at the edge of his module. His head was silhouetted by the telltale behind him. "You could if you were any good at your job!" he shouted. "I'm tired of your excuses!"
The cutting head rose into sight on the display. The Ichton riding it pointed his weapon, a miniature version of the flux generators which had devoured armor denser than the heart of a star.